Talk:Jean-Claude Éloy

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The accent is spurious. If you have heard the name pronounced, you will know it has the grave rather than the aigu E ("Ell-wah", not "Ale-wah") . About four years ago I had an extended offline discussion about this matter with the editor who is largely responsible for the Italian Wikipedia article. (I am personally acquainted with this editor, an Italian scholar also fluent in French and German, who specializes in late-20th-century music including Eloy's.) He was furious about this situation, but the problem at that time is that there were, and remain, any number of reliable sources (including the print second edition of New Grove and the Library of Congress WorldCat) that erroneously give the name with the accent. I see that Ivanka Stoianova (another distinguished scholar and a professor of musicology at the Université de Paris VIII, who has written extensively on Eloy) has corrected this in her 2013 update to the Grove Online. The composer's own website, though perhaps not strictly speaking a "reliable source" by Wikipedia's definition, naturally also spells his name correctly. Is this sufficient to overturn the weight of those erroneous sources? If so, how do we protect against the inevitable objection that the "most reliable sources" use the accent?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:20, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

I received an anonymous email which claims to cite an email exchange with the composer. 3 pars verbatim:

Answering your question : myself, and my family, had never the habit to write our name with an accent on the first letter (the "E").

But I remarked, since several years, that people use the acute accent, writing the first letter : "é"... This is probably the best solution, and I do recommend it from now on, since we do pronounce "éloy" (with the phonetic on the "é").

Too complicated for me, too. I wonder if there is a reliable source where we can hear how this anonymous person and his family pronounce the name. I have only heard announcers on the French radio, who probably got it wrong because of the spelling. I guess under the circumstances it is best left as it is.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 15:43, 1 September 2015 (UTC)